Candida Lycett Green, who has died aged 71 of cancer, often said that she had never been "just me", that the first half of her life was spent as "John Betjeman's daughter" and the latter part, after her younger son achieved fame as a DJ, being "John Lycett Green's mum".
It was an understandable, but misguided view of a life shaped by a force of character entirely her own. She was a prolific writer, broadcaster and journalist. She also edited the two volumes of her father's letters published in 1994 and 1995. Her genius, however, was for less tangible things, for friendship and the ability to bring out the unexpected best in people. Uninterested in convention, either following or deliberately subverting it, she made and maintained a network of connections that amounted to a contour map of postwar England complete with unlikely juxtapositions and the "good laughs", which were, as she wrote in the last weeks of her life, "really the point".
Having come of age in the 1960s, she remained true to all that was best in that decade's efforts to break down social and intellectual barriers. In her late teens, "hanging around in Oxford", she met undergraduates including Richard Ingrams, Willie Rushton and Paul Foot. The self-described men in duffel coats were only too happy for "the most beautiful woman in Oxford", to join them in the revue they took to the Edinburgh festival. To keep the group together after graduation they decided to start a magazine. Candida was responsible for hand-stapling the first issue of Private Eye and decided to send copies to everyone in her parents' address book. As a result the first, improbable, subscriber was the neo-Romantic painter John Piper. Later she took over the magazine's Nooks and Corners architectural column from her father.
Never thinking of herself as "a 'writer' in inverted commas", she claimed that all her ideas came from editors, her only talent was being "very very good at being told what to do". It was an assertion belied by her other claim, that the peak of her journalistic career was covering the 1970 World Cup in Mexico for the London Evening Standard. This was entirely her initiative. Piqued by her husband's decision to go to Mexico with some friends, she wrote to the Standard's editor Charles Wintour arguing that football was the purest form of cultural achievement and that she was the ideal person to convey that fact to his readers. The result was a press pass to travel with "the girls", as the pre-Wags were known, and a riotously good time with Bobby Moore's wife, despite which she filed her copy every night on ticker tape.
Candida was born in Dublin, where her father was press attache at the British embassy. The family returned to Britain in 1943 and she and her elder brother Paul grew up in a succession of houses on the Oxfordshire-Berkshire borders, a landscape she loved and in which she spent the rest of her life. Her memoir, The Dangerous Edge of Things (2005), recalls a happy but spartan village childhood without electricity or mains drainage. Her mother, Penelope Chetwode, was a constant if preoccupied presence, usually "doing something with animals", while of her father's activities she knew only that "he went to London on a train and sometimes came back in the evenings, but not always".
After school at St Mary's, Wantage, she went to Oxford Polytechnic (now Oxford Brookes University) to study sculpture, for which she soon decided she lacked talent. A number of secretarial jobs, from all of which she was fired, led to an opening in journalism on Queen magazine, where she wrote captions for £8 a week, before being sacked again, this time for her connections with Private Eye. In 1973, a year of "big planning decisions" in the capital, she and the Eye's first editor, Christopher Booker, published Goodbye London, a guide to development schemes of which they felt the public was insufficiently aware, with "some recommendations as to how the citizen can involve himself".
She became a lifelong campaigner for conservation and was a commissioner for English Heritage from 1992 until 2001, but her approach was never negative or nostalgic. In her book England, published in 1996, she quoted William Plomer's lines on the "land of everlasting elms" only to point out that it had never existed. Hers was the non-idyllic, real landscape that emerged through time and chance.
Allotments, cooling towers and public housing were included in England and other books celebrated cottages, seaside resorts and the front garden, the last of which became in 1979 the subject of her first television film. When Ingrams started the Oldie magazine in 1992 he gave her a regular feature, which allowed her to make more excursions into what she called unwrecked England.
Having assumed she would marry "some poetic genius", she was not initially impressed by Rupert Lycett Green. An entrepreneur of a peculiarly 60s sort, he ran a West End tailoring shop, Blades that did for men what Mary Quant was doing for women, offering "a young man's view of cut and proportion". It was his brilliance on the dance floor that won her round. They married in 1963 and had three daughters and two sons.
From then on, her marriage and growing family were the centre of her life, though she always worked, partly out of a desire to pay her way and also from necessity, for the Lycett Greens' financial fortunes were uneven. It was only the danger of imminent collapse that made her decide to undertake the editing of her father's letters.
As a child her ambivalence about being cast as Betjeman's daughter had expressed itself at the Christmas parties her father took her to at his old Oxford college, Magdalen. Then she conveyed her unease in the academic world by eating 12 egg sandwiches in a row and asking to be taken home feeling sick. As an adult she remained wary of intellectual life and was unsure about undertaking the task of editorship without a university degree. She consulted Michael Holroyd, the biographer, who told her that he didn't have a degree either and all that was necessary was to love the subject. Her edition of the letters exudes love for her father. The linking introductory passages make up an intimate portrait of him and contain some of her best writing.
In 1999, having recovered from breast cancer, she undertook a 200-mile journey on horseback which raised £125,000 for the complementary care centre at the Churchill cancer hospital in Oxford. Last December she was given a terminal diagnosis of advanced pancreatic cancer.
Exasperated that it came so low down the league table of research as to be "the Sheffield Wednesday" of tumours, she began fundraising again, with her daughter Imogen. The last months of her life were, she said, "wonderful". She planned her memorial celebration in the same detail as the brilliant parties for which she and Rupert were famous. She once said of her father that "he understood better than anyone the point of being alive". In that, she remained John Betjeman's daughter to the end.
She is survived by Rupert and their children, Lucy, Imogen, Endellion, David and John.
• Candida Rose Lycett Green, writer, born 22 September 1942; died 19 August 2014
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